Content Providers (Not ISPs) Make the Internet

Putting aside the debate over who pays for health­care and focus­ing on what is paid for sug­gests that the cur­rent model is trag­i­cally bro­ken. In ancient China, physi­cians’ com­pen­sa­tion was tied to the health of their patients, not how sick they were. Every month the physi­cian would receive a pay­ment from healthy patients and noth­ing from those who were sick and being treated with medicine.

Since health is the goal of the sys­tem, pay­ing when you’re enjoy­ing good health seems to make sense. And incen­tiviz­ing the doc­tor to cure you quickly when you’re sick and get you back to a healthy and fee pay­ing sta­tus seems to make even more sense.

How is it we are so com­fort­able with the oppo­site state of affairs? The more sick we are the more our doc­tors and the med­ical indus­try get paid. While their goal is to heal us, their com­pen­sa­tion is directly related to how ill we are.

We can per­haps excuse this sit­u­a­tion for med­ical care because the west­ern model has been estab­lished for hun­dreds of years. But why have we accepted a sim­i­larly con­flicted busi­ness model for the Internet?

The cur­rent Inter­net pay­ment model com­pen­sates the ISP for pro­vid­ing access to the ser­vice and yet pays the con­tent provider noth­ing for their prod­uct. This is akin to pay­ing the elec­tri­cian who wired your house or the plumber who laid your pipes a monthly fee in per­pe­tu­ity and get­ting your power and water from the util­ity com­pany for nothing.

Who would describe that as a fair and bal­anced com­pen­sa­tion model? While some peo­ple have derided News Corp and the New York Times for their stated ambi­tion to charge for their online con­tent, surely some­thing needs to move in that direc­tion to cre­ate a more equi­table and, more impor­tantly, sus­tain­able model.

It would seem we already have an exist­ing pay­ment sys­tem that could form the basis of a suc­cess­ful model—the cable TV sys­tem. Sub­scribers pay their cable com­pany to pro­vide ser­vice and to deliver a spe­cific set of chan­nels. Cost is based on the quan­tity and qual­ity of the pro­gram­ming with the cable com­pany pay­ing a fee per sub­scriber to each TV chan­nel. While the Inter­net com­pli­cates this model with mil­lions of sites, as opposed to hun­dreds of chan­nels, it shouldn’t be beyond the abil­ity of the math geniuses on Wall Street to develop a func­tion­ing pay­ment system.

Hope­fully the sooner the bet­ter, so I can be con­fi­dent that the sites on which I spend the most will be around for years to come.

I want bet­ter funded and more informed con­tent providers, not fat­ter ISPs.